


The power of intimacy

by Cicuta_virosa



Series: Let's un-fridge a few ladies [3]
Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Ultimates
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Armor Wars (Marvel Comics), But they will have a chance for happiness, F/M, I don't know, Marvel needs to stop introducing female characters just to kill them, So I save Justine, Ultimate Comics Armor Wars, Will they stay together forever?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 06:59:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19740574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cicuta_virosa/pseuds/Cicuta_virosa
Summary: Justine came to Tony to betray him, but working with him, learning a little more about him, changes her fate in a way she couldn't predict.





	The power of intimacy

Howard Stark Senior had spent too long fused to machines. He had forgotten, if he had never knew it, crazy old arrogant fool that he was, the power of intimacy.

Justine had gone to Tony Stark to manipulate him, and to cause his downfall, a sacrificial lamb destined to be delivered to his not-dead-finally, totally-evil, possibly-crazy grandfather.

She had come to Tony Stark ready to seduce him, to lie to him, and if she hadn’t done it with pleasure, she didn’t particularly like to break people even if she didn’t let that stop her, she was ready for it.

She knew his nanofleet was her best chance for survival and she had no intention to ask.

Stark simply using it to save her without being sure she would be on his side, after knowing her for ten minutes, was the first chip in her armour. When she invited herself to his bed, it was still a power play, a way to worm her place just beside him, to betray him at the best moment. Touring the world to help him retrieve his stolen tech wasn’t gratitude, it was simply keeping the prize in sight.

Nevertheless, days working together, nights in each other arms… What a strange man was Tony Stark. An alcoholic, certainly, but a man who used alcohol to blunt the sharpness with which he saw the world. He wanted to protect people with such an intensity. He was crazy, brilliant, impatient against the limitations of the world and infinitely patient in bed, he was the brightest mind produced in the last ten centuries, and so brave in fights it confined to a death wish. He was a bit of an asshole, he was protective, he was stubborn as a mule and delighted when someone had an idea he didn’t have first.

He was a great man, like she had already knew. She had known great men already, her father first.

But Tony Stark, for all he would deny it, was more.

He was a good man.

So the night before she was supposed to hand him over, she renounced her thirty silver coins and she told him the truth.

And now, they are leaving together, alive, on their own two feet, Howard Stark Senior’s hidden compound. Justine is trembling in retrospective terror. She had thought she was saving him, telling him the truth, but at the end, he hadn’t needed help. Remnant 242 had killed Ghost and Howard’s guards and Howard himself, and it would have killed her too, if Tony hadn’t injected her with the mean to shield her nanofleet before going into the trap with her. She would have died, if she hadn’t talked, if he hadn’t known she would certainly be exposed to Remnant 242, since it was in her boss’s hands.

They begin the long walk to civilization. They need a phone to contact Tony’s people, to clean up that mess.

At the first junction, they look at each other. It’s the first time he looks her in the eyes since he learnt the truth.

“What happens, now that it is over?” He says, his blue eyes exhausted but his voice firm. Always the futurist. His mind has already left the horrors of the day to concentrate on the after.

“What do you want to happen?” she asks.

To her stupefaction, he holds out his hand and repeats the words he already said once, before he knew about the betrayal, the manipulation. :

“I want you to stay with me.”

And free, free of her father, of Howard Stark Senior, of the ticking bomb in her blood, she chooses for herself and she takes his hand.


End file.
